


The Forbidden Questions

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Drowning, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Has Anxiety, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Jarvis (Iron Man movies), Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, basically this is me putting our boys thru hell again, i am an angst god, i will not be contained
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 12:58:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15437559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: Tony needs to hear his voice. The kid is definitely asleep by now, but anything--even that stupidly dorky voicemail greeting of his--anything with his voice is what he needs now to calm down. He’s already memorized it:Hey! You’ve reached Peter. Peter Parker. If you’re hearing this, I’m probably in class, asleep, or forgot to charge my phone again. Sorry about that. Although, if you have my number and you’re calling me instead of texting, who even are you? Sorry! Um, you can try me on WhatsApp or DM me on Instagram. I’ll probably get back to you faster that way. Okay, uh, that’s all! Thanks and have a good day!Tony digs the heel of his palm into his right eye as he listens to the ring on the other end of the line. He tries to sync his breathing to the sound, but it’s a useless attempt. His nerves only fray more and more by the second as he listens to the third, then the fourth, then the--Suddenly it cuts off. He wonders with a jolt at first if the call dropped, but it hasn’t. A crackling sound fills his ear. It’s a person. A person breathing.“Kid?” Tony hears himself say.





	The Forbidden Questions

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I caved. I’m actually writing a post-IW fic and acknowledging the Scene That Shall Not Be Named. What did y’all expect when I was listening to “Forest Fire”on repeat?? Oh, and for obvious reasons, this oneshot can’t be included in my A Little Unsteady series (which is really just a giant middle finger to the IW canon).
> 
> So this atrocity was born last night in a conversation with my writing buddy which went something like this:
> 
> Me: shit, I got an idea for another fic  
> Bee: HELL YES TELL MEEEEE  
> Me: BEE. YOU'RE NOT GONNA LIKE ME  
> Bee: [maybe-so.gif]  
> Me: Ok, so.............I caved. I'm gonna write a oneshot that acknowledges IW. Except peter and the other half of the universe came back, yada yada yada, the usual cliche premise. EXCEPT I wanna subvert it. It's not a face to face oneshot, but rather a phone conversation. And tony starts it by calling Pete at 4 in the morning, just wanting to hear the kid's stupid voicemail greeting to calm himself down. So he's v surprised when the kid actually picks up but doesn't say anything at first to tony. And then it devolved into one of those eyerollingly hackneyed late night conversations about the Day That Shall Not Be Named  
> Bee: You’re a monster actually  
> Me: *tearing up* thank you, babe  
> Bee: No like literally the worst. You're even gonna take the fix-it genre from me and make it sad. I can't believe you've done this  
> Me: It's not gonna be THAT sad, sheesh. Like just an 8 on the 1-10 scale of KC angst  
> Bee: I GUESS an 8 probably won't kill me these days.  
> Me: What kinds of flowers would you like at your funeral?  
> Bee: *(sighs)* Daisies and sunflowers, please
> 
> ...So naturally, I wrote this instead of sleeping.
> 
> Theme song: ["Forest Fire" by Brighton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBqzXYcSdns)

Tony’s first clear memory is the day he turned six. It was the day he almost drowned, trying to prove a stupid point to his father, and it is a day he remembers with a crystalline clarity almost unparalleled by anything else in his life.

Howard had been overly fond of the oversized pool behind the estate--a pool with lavish lion head fountains and mosaics lining the floor. Every gathering required at least a view of the pool. At the wildest summer soirees, he had a ritual that imprinted in Tony’s brain: Howard would climb the diving board leisurely, wine glass balanced between his fingertips, and then down his drink, hand it off airily to one of the servants, and shed his linen button-down with a theatrical fling before diving headfirst into the deep end. He would surface with his hands slicking back his dark hair and his lips twitching in a cool smirk as the men gathered round in garden chairs would erupt in a smattering of applause.

Even after the incident on that day of Tony’s sixth birthday, Howard continued his ritual. His display.

Tony remembers standing at the opposite end of the pool, concrete jagged and scorching under the bare soles of his feet, but unable to think much of it because of how much the sight of his father catapulting seamlessly into the water made his chest twinge with the awe and the fury of a child.

He doesn’t remember much between the last second he stood rooted to the spot and the first second he gripped the ladder of the diving board with his tiny hands. The next thing he knew, his toes were slipping on the heat of the rungs, and he was scrambling up, up, up, until he was swaying on the board in the glare of the midday sun. The flares of the sunbeams glinting off the surface of the water warped the mosaic of the lion at the floor into a monstrosity, a wavering image that seemed to come alive before little Tony and hypnotized him, beckoned him, goaded him to jump.

He didn’t jump so much as he stepped forward, then changed his mind at the last moment but tripped backwards over his own feet and then lurched forward into the horrifying void.

He didn’t even scream. Didn’t flail his arms, didn’t try to catch onto the end of the bouncing diving board. He just plummeted like a stone for what seemed like ten interminable minutes that would play on a loop in his mind for the rest of his life. It was a moment that seemed to occupy both a sliver of infinity and the snap of a finger: one moment, his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth as he was falling, falling, _falling_ \--and then the next, a terror like he had never known before bloomed at the base of his skull and wrapped its fingers around his throat to cut off his scream underwater.

It was freezing. Not even the coldest showers he’d taken could compare to the icy fire that seared his spine. It couldn’t have been more than four, five, six seconds that he was underwater, and yet his lungs were already constricting. He gasped. Tried to open his mouth instinctively to suck in a breath, but more icy water flooded his throat. He coughed. Thrashed. Everything suddenly burned, amid the infinite cold of it all.

The thought crossed his mind that he would never know warmth again. He regretted not remembering anything of his life before that moment, because wasn’t that what they always said in the stories? That you could see your life flash before your eyes a second before your soul slips away? He didn’t know where he’d heard that from, but he knew with sudden, jolting clarity that he remembered nothing. He was a child. Even his childhood would be denied him in his last moment on earth.

Dimly he registered another splash somewhere near him, and then there were arms around him, squeezing his middle, tugging him away from the hypnotic stare of the lion that seemed to mock him from below. It was almost just as painful as dying. Just when he’d begun to accept his fate, the tug grew stronger, and then he was being wrenched bodily from the water and he felt as though he were being flung straight into the air.

Moments passed in a flurry of shouts. Voices layering over each other. He was on his back on something hard and rough and warm, almost scalding. Cement. His little fingers sought purchase in the ground below him. The sky was spinning above him. He could no longer count the clouds--but it didn’t matter, because the next thing he knew, Jarvis’s head was blocking his view of the sun and puffs of white.

Perhaps Jarvis struck his chest, perhaps he didn’t. This was where Tony’s memory became jumbled. All he can recall was the punch of air to his lungs and a burn like a bruise springing beneath his ribs. His throat was raw. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to blink. And it hurt, it _hurt_ , the relief he felt at seeing Jarvis’s face and not his father’s.

The only other detail of that day branded into Tony’s remembrance is how Howard half-stood from his garden chair, wine glass still in hand, looking over with a vague concern lifting his eyebrows. And then his countenance scudding over with an anger that little Tony was sure would translate to a thorough haranguing later.

When his mother brought up that day several years later, close to Tony’s twelfth birthday, by way of preamble to her intention to enroll him in swimming lessons, Tony felt his heart slam in his chest and then freeze there, refusing to beat. He smiled up at her without looking her directly in the eye, and he shrugged, saying, “Oh. Good thing I don’t remember that.”

Someone had told him afterward that drowning was one of the best ways to go. Sometimes painless, almost peaceful. Like falling asleep floating in a wavering cloud of silence. Tony bit his tongue against the argument that rose to his lips. No.

Drowning had to be the worst way to die. The fear he’d felt that day had been so visceral, so alive, a vice grip on his heart that prevented his body from doing anything while his brain and his consciousness screamed into the emptiness. He could see everything, feel everything, and do nothing all the while.

And so he has a system. He has a scale, and he uses it to gauge the arrow of pain that lodges between his ribs when the panic hits him: zero to drowning. After number ten comes the wormhole, and then Afghanistan, and then drowning. He tells Pepper once about the scale. Her face twists of its own accord, as if it is taking every last ounce of willpower inside her to school her features into an expression of comfort and understanding, but the fingers of rage and hopelessness in her heart will not let her rule her emotions this time.

June 7, 2018. He’s awake in the dead of night. The silence around him envelopes him like cotton, like the muffled waver of voices from behind the surface of water. He can feel it, the sensation of drowning, slowly approaching him. Consuming him from his feet and crawling upward.

His bed is too soft. Too unreal. He swings his feet over the edge and almost sighs in relief at the unforgiving hardness of the wood beneath his feet. Behind him, Pepper lets out a small sound almost like a question, but her breathing remains even. She is still asleep.

He lets himself fall softly to the floor. Hands first, then elbows. He lays his palms flat against the wood. He needs this. But it is not nearly enough. Somehow, _somehow_ , the drowning is still following him. It is a rabid dog now, sinking its teeth into his ankles and making its way up and up and up still from inside him.

Tony stumbles to his feet and makes it somehow to the door. He wrenches it open and runs barefoot across the sitting room and the living room to the glass door of the balcony.

The punch of humid night air is an almost welcome alternative to the pain within his bones. He finds himself pushing his legs through the gaps in the iron bars of the balcony and resting his forehead against the cool metal. His gaze wanders to the pool below, shimmering in the moonlight. He thinks--irrationally--just how easy it would be to fling himself into it.

Did it feel like this for Peter, too, when he was crumbling into dust in a haze of crimson flames on a foreign planet? Did it feel like falling in the pool did? Did the pain start at the base of his spine and spread through the pathways of his nerves while he could do nothing but lie there with his mind racing a mile per minute?

Did he drown?

Or did he burn?

Tony starts to think the two sensations are one and the same.

Suddenly he’s fiddling with his phone and dialing before he can control himself. He needs to know the kid is okay.

Christ, it’s four a.m.

But he needs to know Peter is okay.

Needs to know. Needs to know.

Needs to know that he’s still Peter. That he’s flesh and blood, curls and pale skin and long eyelashes. Seventeen years old. He’s a kid. He’s still a kid.

On a scale of one to ten, how bad? Beyond ten. Past the wormhole. Past Afghanistan. Hovering on the edge of drowning.

Seventeen days. It took them seventeen days to work it out. For him to fly back out there, to set his red and gold titanium boots again on that god-forsaken land of dust painted like a mosaic of blood and fire.

Seventeen days. One day lost for every year of the kid’s life given.

Tony needs to hear his voice. The kid is definitely asleep by now, but anything--even that stupidly dorky voicemail greeting of his--anything with his voice is what he needs now to calm down. He’s already memorized it:

_Hey! You’ve reached Peter. Peter Parker. If you’re hearing this, I’m probably in class, asleep, or forgot to charge my phone again. Sorry about that. Although, if you have my number and you’re calling me instead of texting, who even are you? Sorry! Um, you can try me on WhatsApp or DM me on Instagram. I’ll probably get back to you faster that way. Okay, uh, that’s all! Thanks and have a good day!_

Tony digs the heel of his palm into his right eye as he listens to the ring on the other end of the line. He tries to sync his breathing to the sound, but it’s a useless attempt. His nerves only fray more and more by the second as he listens to the third, then the fourth, then the--

Suddenly it cuts off. He wonders with a jolt at first if the call dropped, but it hasn’t. A crackling sound fills his ear. It’s a person. A person breathing.

“Kid?” Tony hears himself say. He’s too surprised to let his voice break.

The boy on the other end of the line lets out another ragged breath. He doesn’t speak.

Tony feels himself deflating against the iron bars. “Kid,” he says again. “You’re awake.”

Silence stretches for two more heartbeats. Then, a whisper so low he almost misses it: “So are you.”

Tony doesn’t have an answer for that. He wants to snap, maybe. Tell the kid that he _told_ him to call, no matter the time of day, whenever it gets bad. And then maybe he wants to weep. His fingers curl into a fist at his side.

Peter clears his throat. It takes him several attempts before he seems to succeed at getting his voice to work. “How bad is it?”

Now Tony wants to laugh. And he does. It hurts at first, the bubble rising up from his stomach. He lets out a chuckle that sounds somewhere between a wheeze and a cry of pain. Because pain is all he ever knows these days.

“It’s not good, kid,” he replies. “You?”

“Not...not good either.” It sounds like Peter sucks in a deep breath through his nose to cut off whatever else he was going to say.

Tony remarks, “It’s quiet tonight.”

“Too quiet,” the kid agrees. “Quieter than it’s been in a while, I guess.”

“You know you can always come back over. Whenever you want. You’re always welcome.”

“I know.”

“May too.”

“Yeah. Yeah, yeah…” A rustle of sheets and a squeak of the bedframe as Peter sits up. “I know.”

There’s another lull between them.

“It was quiet,” says Peter. “Too quiet. At some point I thought I’d gone deaf.”

Tony wishes with a sudden fervency they were having this conversation face-to-face, because then he could look into the boy’s eyes and ask silently, _in the Soul World_?

Instead he hums and listens.

“I mean, I could--I could _hear_ , I guess, but I also couldn’t. Like everything was muffled. I could see everything--not that it made much sense--but the sound was, it was, it was distorted, to the point that I, uh...started to doubt that I’d ever known what real sound was actually like.”

The knife returns to Tony’s ribs.

Drowning.

The kid had drowned.

It strikes Tony with an odd and maddening clarity then that Peter is yet to call him _Mr. Stark_ in this conversation--or call him anything, for that matter. It is as if they are under a spell beneath the silent stars tonight, and the truth that’s suddenly pouring out of Peter will be curtailed if Tony breathes or speaks again now.

“I don’t know how long I was there, but it’s...not exactly like I could count the seconds or anything. The quiet was bothering me a lot more. And it felt like millennia. I don’t know. Maybe it was millennia. There were--there were _so many_ thoughts, like I was going through an entire lifetime of thinking while the rest of me was just stuck somewhere else…”

Another thought traipses unbidden across Tony’s mind: had so many years actually passed in the Soul World? Is that why he’s felt like he’s been talking to an older Peter? The voice of a boy with the jaded weariness of a man. 

He shies away from the tail end of that notion. He can’t afford to stare it in the face. Not now.

“Mr. Stark.”

There it is. A shade of relief colors his voice. “Kid.”

“Mr. Stark, was it quiet?”

“Without you yapping constantly somewhere in the background?” He chokes, and the joke falls flat on his tongue. “Yeah, kid. Yeah. It was quiet.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Don’t you--don’t you _fucking_ dare--” The wrath comes out of nowhere and crashes over him like a tidal wave. His hand shakes again and he balls it into a fist. His voice falls again, mimicking the apology his tongue can’t quite bring him yet to say. He knocks his forehead softly, repeatedly, against the iron bars. “Kid. Don’t be sorry.”

Peter is too tired to argue. 

“Tell me what you’re doing right now,” Tony says.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Just--talk to me. Talk at me. Tell me what you’re doing, what you’re seeing.”

The boy understands in a flash. All it takes is the space of a second for him to draw in a deep breath, and then he fills the silence with his voice.

He starts out slowly, stumbling over his words as he recounts his day at school in a disjointed timeline. He talks about catching Ned wiping his eyes over lunch break when he thought Peter wasn’t looking. He talks about gym class, how Flash didn’t seem to have the energy to mock him, or to mock anybody at all, for that matter. He talks about the phone call he got from May at work at the end of his last period, which was a pleasant surprise. He talks about the dust in the corners of his locker that never used to bother him before, but now forces the bubble of panic to rise in his chest when his fingers touch the unswept surface.

Peter talks and he doesn’t shy away this time from the threat of embarrassment. He talks, too, about the dust on his shoes, the dust scattered across the floors of the subway. The dust on the ballisters of the staircase in his apartment building. The dust filling the crevices of the mailbox. The dust on top of the cabinets, on the boxes of Ben’s clothes in the spare closet, on every exposed surface of the picture frames all throughout his home. 

He talks about obsessively cleaning. Polishing. Wiping and wiping everything down, and then wiping again, until the panic finally claws its way back up and bursts out of him with a triumphant scream. The activity of his hands can only keep the monster at bay for so long.

“I’ve never screamed before,” Peter admits quietly. “Not, like, not when they died. Or Uncle Ben died. Or when--when the Vulture--or Skip...or any of the fights, or when Mr. Rhodey had to dig the bullet out…”

“I know,” Tony says. There’s nothing else to say.

“Yeah,” the kid speaks again.

“But you did this time?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“It was the quiet,” says Peter. “The quiet again. I couldn’t take it. I needed to fill it, somehow. I don’t--I don’t know.”

Tony can almost hear that scream at the forefront of his mind, a scream he has never heard and prays he will never have to hear, yet all the same he curses himself for not being there. He swallows heavily. “That’s okay. I get that.”

“I’m sitting on the floor,” Peter says. “Back against the bed. It’s--I need it to--it feels real.”

“Me too.”

“Oh.” There’s a punctuation of realization behind the surprise. As if it’s dawning on the boy that the man, too, suffers the horror of the dust, the unreal. The terror of feeling the kid’s ashes slip through his fingers like nothing.

Like the quiet.

Like the void.

Like drowning.

It’s a forbidden image. A memory that should not be named.

Still, the rarity of the openness of their conversation pushes Tony with a recondite force to ask: “Peter, how are you?”

A forbidden question: the first of many.

Peter exhales loudly into the phone, as if to say _I just told you about my entire day down to the last goddamn detail of my panic attack_ , but he and Tony both know he knows that’s not what the man meant.

“I’ll be okay,” he says instead, and for a fraction of second, Tony feels something shoot through him like gratitude that the kid said _I will be okay_ and not _I’m okay_.

“You will,” Tony finds himself replying, with a different brand of certainty that he didn’t know he possessed. “You’ll be okay. Not today. But you’ll be okay.”

“So will you, Mr. Stark.”

Tony chokes again, silently. He highly doubts it, but now is not the time to voice that to the boy. And he thinks to himself just then that he’s discovered another nightmare: his scale is no longer zero to drowning. No. It just might have changed from zero to ashes.

He doesn’t say thank you. He can’t bring himself to. “Peter, can I ask you something?”

Another forbidden question.

Peter huffs out a little laugh on the line, maybe thinking how odd it is that Tony Stark, of all people, is asking for permission to ask a question. The irony is not lost on the man himself. “Sure, Mr. Stark.”

“I want you to be honest.”

There’s wariness now in the boy’s voice. “...I usually am.”

“Not the scintillating assurance I was looking for, but I’ll take it,” Tony says. His lungs shudder a bit. “How much do you hate me?”

“Wh--uh. What?”

“Kid.”

“I don’t.”

Tony knocks his brow against the iron bars again.

“Mr. Stark, stop that,” Peter says suddenly, very clearly.

How…? Oh, right. “Stupid superhearing,” Tony mutters at him with a twitch at his lips.

“I don’t hate you,” says Peter.

“Why not?”

As the third forbidden question leaves his tongue, Tony closes his eyes and thinks of the icy jolt that started in his spine and exploded into his limbs as his tiny body hit the water. He thinks of the absence of memory that bothered him in what he thought were his last moments on earth. He thinks about the wild look in Jarvis’s eyes and the deadness in Howard’s, and he thinks about the roar of pain from where Jarvis pounded his chest, and he thinks how grateful he was for that punch because of the pure, ragged, sweet air that filled his lungs afterwards.

“I don't hate you,” Peter says again. “I never could, Mr. Stark. You know that.”

The flavor of Peter's own forbidden question is laced in his tone: _And how come you don't hate me?_

“If you hadn't been on Titan, maybe the universe wouldn't have...wouldn’t have. God. I. I don't know. Picked you. Flung you into the half that was...doomed.” Words are too clumsy for Tony now.

The kid's breathing grows heavy again. His tone is low. “No, it's--no. That's not it. It still would have. But if I--if I'd've been back on earth, then I wouldn't have--you wouldn't...ashes in your hands.”

It sounds like the air is clawing at the confines of the boy’s lungs.

_But then you would have crumbled alone._

Tony should say something, he knows. Now that the cards are on the table and they’ve finally given utterance to their deepest regrets from that day, he ought to say something.

“I only regret you being on Titan and getting...so, so hurt. But never, ever, even for a second, think that I regret being with you then.”

_In your final moments on a strange planet._

His cheeks are wet. He's crying.

“Please don't say that again,” he gasps out.

Peter makes him a promise then. “I won't.”

“Good. That's settled. We don't hate each other.” Tony's voice is a warble. He wipes frantically at his face. He's shaking, his hand is shaking, the sky is shaking, everything in the goddamn universe is shaking as it hangs over him by a thread. They're flares of sunbeams bouncing off the surface of the water and distorting everything beneath it.

“God,” Tony chokes. “Don't--we shouldn't--I still hate your voice, you know. Your stories about churros and Ted and his Legos. You always barging into my lab with a bucket of _my_ ice cream and your stupid grin and that goddamn suit that's always--that’s always--”

Peter lets out a low, tired laugh, though one filled with an odd kind of contentment all the same. “I know, Mr. Stark. I know.”

Tony's hand slowly begins to uncurl, and the jagged edge of his breath begins to ebb as he leans back and away from the iron bars. Away from the sight of the pool below.

He has some answers now, not all of them forbidden.

His heart is still beating. His lungs are still breathing. His nerves are quiet and his ears are filled with the blessed, _blessed_ sound of Peter Parker's voice.

Seventeen days lost. One for each year of the kid's life. And yet there stand many more years to come, and Tony Stark will see to it, if it's the last thing he will do.

How bad is it now? On a scale of zero to ashes?

On June 7, 2018, it drops to a three. And that is the lowest it has been in ages.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: pls don't kill me k thx bye <333
> 
> [tumblr](http://theoceanismyinkwell.tumblr.com) | [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/kc_barrie) | [insta](http://www.instagram.com/kc.barrie) | [fb](http://www.facebook.com/KCBarrie) | [gofundme](http://www.gofundme.com/help-single-mom-move-to-safety)
> 
> [A Little Unsteady](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1041275) series


End file.
